Achieving global food security is a major challenge for the ever-increasing population, predicted to be about 10 billion by 2050. Accordingly, the worldwide demand for food is projected to increase by approximately 60% (Nature Food, 2, 494–501 (2021). This warrants a continuous increase in agricultural production to meet future food and nutritional demands. Besides increasing productivity, making agriculture sustainable and climate resilient has become essential keeping in view diminishing agricultural resources like arable land, fresh water and soil degradation, and also the adverse impact of climate change and emerging pests and pathogens on crop production.
Despite significant progress in increasing food production in the past, currently, 870 million people continue to suffer from chronic hunger. The United Nations members adopted in 2015 seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with Goal 2 (SDG2) aimed at achieving Zero Hunger by 2030. The SDG2 also calls for a 100% increase in smallholder productivity and income. However, it has been reported that we are far away from achieving zero hunger. The recent Global Report on Food Crises (2024) further confirms the urgency of achieving the goal of ending hunger by 2030. What is, therefore, needed is an international cooperation of researchers and organisations to accelerate the process of developing high-yielding crop varieties resilient to insect pests, diseases, abiotic stresses and climate change for achieving sustainable agriculture and food security worldwide.
According to the World Economic Forum (2022), “Smallholder farmers are key to food security. Our over-reliance on smallholder farmers to feed our growing population cannot be overstated, and yet the risk and responsibility these farmers face on a daily basis is not matched by the financial, technical and technological support they need to thrive”.
There are approximately 600 million smallholder farmers in the world with less than 2 hectares of land, producing about 80 percent of food in the developing world, more so in Africa and Asia. Since there is no possibility of further expanding the area under cultivation to produce more food, boosting crop productivity on the existing lands is the only viable option. Thus, increasing agricultural productivity per unit of land area is vital for the smallholders to enhance food production. Global cooperation is essentially needed to support them by providing the benefits of the latest scientific innovations and technological developments.
Notably, an innovative technology was born about a decade ago, the CRISPR-based genome editing for addressing pressing challenges and unlocking unprecedented opportunities in agriculture and health sectors. This innovative technology holds promise in enhancing agricultural productivity and crop yields bolstering global food security. Besides, it offers opportunities to advance environmental sustainability and build climate resilience.
Genome editing aids in accelerating the breeding process and overcoming genetic constraints that limit conventional breeding methods, and facilitates speedy development of improved high-yielding, pest and pathogen-resistant crop varieties with enhanced resource use efficiency and better suited to diverse agroecological conditions and climatic extremes. Also, it has the potential to enrich staple crops with essential vitamins, minerals, and proteins to combat malnutrition and address dietary deficiencies prevalent in vulnerable populations. However, in order to fully deploy and maximize the benefits of this powerful technology, international cooperation among the scientific community is crucial for developing the desired crop varieties for the smallholder farmers of the developing world. By fostering partnerships across regions and leveraging global expertise, developing countries can make progress more efficiently in producing crop varieties with traits as described above.
The technology developers and international organisations support will facilitate building the much-needed technical expertise of researchers on genome editing, and in addressing certain challenges related to regulatory and IP issues. Technical support is particularly needed for efficient delivery of CRISPR reagents into plant cells, and for optimizing tissue culture protocols for regenerating genetically transformed and edited plants with reasonably high editing efficiency. Further, certain complex and quantitative traits like crop yield or factors contributing to yield like photosynthesis, plant morphology and climate resilience are controlled by multiple genes or regulatory elements. Thus, editing multiple genes simultaneously or engineering regulatory networks can be technically demanding.
The COVID-19 pandemic has amply demonstrated the importance of global collaboration in vaccine research and development. Likewise, we need to address global food insecurity and malnutrition to fulfil the long-pending requirement of eradicating hunger from the face of this planet Earth. Thus, collaborative efforts are needed on capacity building and enhancing the technical competence of researchers in developing or low- and middle-income countries, and also addressing socio-economic disparities to maximize the benefits of genome editing technologies.
Further, collective scientific efforts including the free exchange of CRISPR technologies developed and patented by publicly funded research institutions will ensure speedy development and commercial release of crop varieties for the smallholder farmers.
The genome-edited products are subjected to regulation before they are approved for commercial release. Since the regulatory landscape governing genome-edited crops varies globally, international cooperation and collaborative efforts can help harmonize the regulatory frameworks. Several nations including India have already declared a category of genome-edited crops that are free from foreign, exogenously introduced DNA as non-GMOs, and hence exempted from regulation. Shared guidelines and standard operating procedures (SOPs) will foster confidence among stakeholders, facilitate global acceptance of genome-edited products and promote international trade.
Today the world has turned into a global village. The G20 Summit held in India carried the theme “One Earth, One Family, One Future,” clearly signifying the role of international collaboration. The summit recommended open sharing of science and innovative technologies for capacity building and searching common solutions for achieving food security and climate resilience in the agriculture sector. This will enable researchers to tackle diverse agricultural challenges collectively by pooling expertise and will accelerate the development of resilient crop varieties tailored to local environmental conditions. Thus, international cooperation with renewed commitment and coordinated global action can play a pivotal role in addressing the global challenges for improving food security, achieving Zero Hunger, enhancing agricultural sustainability, and paving the way for a more resilient and equitable future.
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